


Bid My Blood to Run

by rightsidethru



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: (Seriously though. Don't ever piss off Stiles.), BAMF Stiles, M/M, Magical Stiles Stilinski, Necromancer Stiles Stilinski, Pre-Slash, Pseudo Ghost Story, Scott McCall is a Bad Alpha, Scott is a Bad Friend, Sorta anyway., Spark Stiles Stilinski, Steter - Freeform, Stiles Stilinski Does What He Wants, True Alpha Scott McCall, Wordcount: 1.000-5.000, machiavellian
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-31
Updated: 2017-10-31
Packaged: 2019-01-21 06:20:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,443
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12451377
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rightsidethru/pseuds/rightsidethru
Summary: Samhain--All Hallow's Eve--still remained the day where the veil between the living and the dead lay thinnest.It went without saying that Stiles ended up taking advantage of this fact when it became clear that Scott's leadership skills weren't enough to guarantee the safety of Beacon Hills' populace.





	Bid My Blood to Run

**Author's Note:**

> So I still have a rather full plate at the moment, stories-wise. But I had written this earlier in the month so that it could be posted today. With that said: Happy Halloween! ;D This didn't end up as ghost story-y as I was hoping it would be, but... there's still a ghost in it, so close enough. Right? Right. :P
> 
> **
> 
> Kudos and comments are loved and appreciated! <3
> 
> **
> 
> Yes, the title is a reference to "Bring Me To Life" from Evanescence. *no shame~*

_Webs are made mostly of spaces. They break easily. They barely exist. They belong to the category of half-things: mist, smoke, shrouds, ghosts, membranes, retinas or rags; and they quickly fill up with un-things: old legs and wings and heads and hollow abdomens and body bags of wasps._  
\-- Alice Oswald

++

The rough wood of the Nemeton’s exposed trunk pulsed with a steady sort of power beneath Stiles’ crossed legs, ley lines’ node burning as bright as a dwarf star beneath the teen’s jeans-clad thighs. While it was true enough that, once upon a time ago, the Nemeton had flared brighter still… even now, the focal point packed enough of a punch to allow Stiles to accomplish what he had come here to do: so, too, had the node slowly began gaining power once more, growing stronger over the course of the past several months and the attention that the Spark had paid to it, nursing the node bit by bit and making it stronger.

Scott and the rest of his Pack were unaware of Stiles’ silent task, Deaton and his sister as blind as the majority of them, but that was all to the teen’s own benefit. If they had known… perhaps the Nemeton would have been burned to ash and soot this time around. Perhaps they would have found a way to bind Stiles’ own powers, ruling that the magic that coursed through the amber-eyed boy’s veins was too much for one person to contain. Honestly, the latter wouldn’t have surprised Stiles by this point in the game: but that was also why he was here.

Beacon Hills’ True Alpha saw the world painted in shades of black and white, labeling monsters-made-flesh with arbitrary terms of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ when… things were so much more complicated, so much more complex, than all of that. The world was colored in various hues of gray, ‘good’ and ‘evil’ were concepts that only children truly believed in anymore, and the dismissive, irresponsible sort of behavior that Scott tended to fall back on would one day get the Pack and their families killed. Stiles had learned the hard way that Scott was blind in the worst sorts of ways; while the Spark still viewed the other boy as a brother… it was family, oftentimes, that became intimately aware of each other’s flaws. 

Stiles himself was no saint—he would be the first to admit to his own shortcomings—but Scott painted himself as some sort of Messiah ‘wolf with the title of True Alpha and—the other teen still knew _nothing_ of the culture he was now indoctrinated into or even his own role within the Pack and the territory he now claimed as his own as Alpha. He was still willfully, happily ignorant of his responsibilities, and Stiles could easily see just how that attitude was trickling down to the others, how the arrogance and carelessness and rejection of the wolf within reflected itself a multitude of times until the Pack became nothing more than a sham of what it was truly supposed to be.

It wouldn’t be long, then, before they faced a Big Bad that they couldn’t overcome, didn’t understand, or Scott would wrongfully grant a second chance to. The hourglass to that particular event had been trickling ever onwards in the back of Stiles’ head for weeks, months—years, even—but it hadn’t been until the previous week before that the whiskey-eyed boy finally decided to do something about it.

(A second chance granted to a group of rakshasa. Three families had been decimated two days later as a result.)

So everything had finally come to a head for Stiles, which was why he was here, now, carefully drawing up thick strands of the Nemeton’s power, tugging gently to then imbibe them into the series of runes that had been painted in blood over his arms and along the outside of the sacrificial bowl.

The power built, the air within the clearing grew heavier, and Stiles’ eyes _glowed_ in the midnight darkness—

A dark shape prowled the edge of grass and trees, just a flicker of movement—here and gone again—but it was enough of a shift for the teen to catch sight of it; he tracked the hidden figure with a still-bright gaze, never looking away until that shape finally stepped forward and into the moonlight. It revealed itself to be a too-large wolf, broad in the shoulders and large enough that its head would have been level with the teen’s shoulder—too huge to be fully natural, fur a matte, inky black that blended in with the shadows that slowly creeped in as the moon dipped low towards the horizon. It was the wolf’s gaze that gave away its supernatural status, however: a pair of bloodily crimson eyes stared up at the boy perched upon the Nemeton’s corpse.

“Hello, Talia Hale,” Stiles greeted quietly as he reached across the small amount of space between himself and the bowl, snuffing out the flickering flame within it with a pinch of his fingers. Smoke twined between his long, pianist fingers, lingering in a silver-touched caress that smelt of wolfsbane and rot, a sinister sort of darkness that matched nicely with the shadows that kissed the boy’s burning gaze.

The wolf stilled at being identified, and silence settled within the clearing for a long moment or two—long enough to feel like an eternity but the beating of their hearts giving lie to the impression. She shifted closer, however, stepping nearer towards the Nemeton and, as the she-wolf did so, fur melted from her body and bones rearranged themselves: she _shifted_ , flowing from one form to another, and it was finally a human woman who stepped forward to stop at the Nemeton’s edge to stand amongst its dried-out roots.

“You know me _and_ you managed to summon me here; I heard your call even in death. _Who are you?_ ” the Alpha asked, power rumbling through her words—intentional or not—enough to shudder the ground beneath their feet. It was a display that, perhaps, Derek would have one day been able to learn—but, for Scott, _never_. Wolf and human bled from one to another with this woman, one and the same, and while Stiles held a grudge against the old Hale Pack Alpha for a great many things… there was no denying the grace and beauty of the wildness of the power she wielded so easily.

“My name is Stiles,” the teen answered, meeting Talia’s red gaze without flinching. “You don’t know me because I would have been around Cora’s age when you died and I hadn’t yet stumbled across the supernatural world at that point in my life. I’m a Spark, though. That’s how your shade stepped through the veil—it’s because I brought you here.”

Suspicion and perhaps a touch of fear flickered across the dead Alpha’s face, and Talia shifted just enough to settle her weight on the balls of her feet. “And _why_ am I here, Stiles?” she asked, expression edging into something carefully neutral, and Stiles watched, impressed and angry both: this woman was the reason why Deaton never bothered taking a more active role as Emissary—not when Talia believed herself to be an effective enough orator and negotiator (there were a fair dozen reasons for Stiles’ grudge; this was perhaps just one of them).

The boy smoothed the palms of his hands over the muscles of his thighs, fingers curling into the fabric stretched taut at his knees. He quirked a lopsided smirk towards the older woman, though the expression never once touched her gaze. “Tell me, Talia Hale: when you were Alpha of the Hale Pack, what would you have done upon realizing that a coven of witches had moved into your territory and were using young children as sacrifices to their spells? What would you have done upon realizing that a kelpie was taking advantage of your inattention and began drowning swimmers in the Beacon Hills Lake? What would you have done upon realizing that the Sluagh had claimed the town as its newest hunting grounds? What would you have done upon realizing that an Alpha Pack had targeted your Pack and was intent on you killing your packmembers to then join them? What would you have done if family after family of Hunters came to town, openly planning on decimating you, your Pack, and any other supernatural creature under your protection? Tell me: what would you have done?”

Crimson eyes flared brighter at the scenarios listed before the one-time Alpha, and she snarled lowly when Stiles finally fell quiet, his litany of situations eventually stopped: the examples were too pointed to be anything but things that the Spark drew from his own experience and… the thought of such darkness and chaos, disorder terrifyingly skewed left her feeling almost ill. “What has happened in my home, my territory?” she asked in answer. “Why are you asking me these things?”

Stiles’ gaze was implacable, however: “Tell me, _Talia Hale_ : what would you have done?”

The demands that she would have otherwise given, wanting clarification from the teen, stilled upon her tongue: words quieted, went unsaid, and she found herself swaying forward to answer the boy’s question instead: “I would have protected my territory, my Pack, no matter what that would end up meaning. I would ensure that others were aware that Beacon Hills was looked after by an Alpha who understood what it meant to be _Alpha_.”

\--and, as her words fell emptily into the space between them, a sense of unease stirred within the dead woman: she recalled, distantly, stories told between the Pack adults and the then-Emissary of magic users, of Fae, who were able to command a person’s body and mind, claiming control after stating a _true name_ several times. Stiles had spoken her full name three times—and he was obviously a magic user, a Spark, and powerful and talented enough to make her come to heel at his call, even from within the deepest valleys of the shadowed realm of the dead.

“Why did you summon me here?” Talia asked again, claws and fangs lengthening as the sense of _threat_ grew.

The boy offered her yet another lopsided smirk at that, head tilting bird-like to the side as he glanced at her from beneath a thick line of dark lashes. “My best friend is currently the True Alpha of Beacon Hills. I love him like a brother, but… we’ll be dead within the next year or two if things continue as-is. I don’t want to kill Scott, no matter how poorly he’s managing things, and I don’t want to chance him accidentally dying by trying to transfer the Alpha power to someone else—like how Derek nearly did when he was trying to save Cora. But you…? You were an Alpha, still obviously have that power—and you’re already dead, too. Win-win scenario all around.”

Realization dawned hard and fast, horror and fear and fury at _knowing_ just what this slip of a boy intended to do, and Talia snarled and lunged for the teen, claws fully extended and reaching for his throat—

And Stiles _yanked_ , hands glowing in shades of bronze and copper, burning bright enough to leave behind spots with each blink, and Talia’s shade shredded to something less than pieces at the angry, abrupt gesture from the Spark: she roared in pain, sound echoing throughout the Preserve, trembled the ground beneath the echo, but the magic user didn’t flinch as he tore into her soul and _pulled_ the Alpha power from it.

Talia Hale became less than a memory, and Stiles cradled a blood-dark ember between his cupped hands.

++

Peter knew that he was most likely going to die tonight.

Even years after his resurrection, he was weaker than what he should have been: besides the typical lack of trust that Scott viewed him with, it was why the older man was usually put on research duty (as well as the fact that Peter, Stiles, and Lydia were obviously the brains in the Pack, but Peter was the one with access to rare books). There was a lack of force to his strikes that the beta still found frustrating, especially when he compared his abilities to Before—before he died, before the fire, before he rotted away, packless, in the hospital, before Talia began nipping away at memories and pieces of his soul—but there was little to nothing that Peter could do about it now. The True Alpha had sent Stiles to investigate several rumors that a vampire coven had moved into the abandoned warehouse district, and the blue-eyed man had come along to keep an eye on the normally hyperactive teen.

Stiles had been cautious from the start, however, and that had put Peter on edge; it hadn’t mattered, though, not really. They had still been ambushed, cornered within the building that Derek used to train his old betas in. The irony would have been hilarious if the fear hadn’t taken prevalence: Peter knew that he and Stiles were outnumbered, knew that he wasn’t strong enough to ensure that they both got out of here safely, knew that there was a very real chance that the boy would be dead by night’s end.

The thought of losing the single Pack bond that Peter had managed to build up upon his return… it was unthinkable.

“When I move to attack, I expect you to run and keep running until you reach the Jeep,” the blue-eyed beta ordered, voice quiet as Peter shifted to settle more of his body between Stiles and the group of vampires who watched the duo with hungry, feral gazes. There was a resignation settling itself like Atlas’ weight upon the older man’s shoulders—the knowledge that he would soon be dead and that that death would not be painless—but so, too, it was obvious that Peter had no intention of backing away from his instructions if it meant that Stiles would live.

A life for a life: everything for the Pack, _this_ Pack--this boy.

“Peter,” Stiles began, reaching out to tug the ‘wolf back; he _pulled_ , hard enough to partially shift Peter around, and tilted his head upwards to brush his mouth against the older man’s in a quietly sweet kiss. It didn’t last long, not with the danger that the vampires still posed, and Stiles’ mouth slanted into a wickedly sharp smirk as he stepped away. “For luck.”

Peter’s lashes lifted as the distance between him and Stiles grew, and the ‘wolf’s eyes slowly bled red.

::fin::


End file.
